In New England’s first two centuries, Christmas was primarily notable for its absence. Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony inaugurated the region's tradition of nonobservance by squelching a celebration in 1621. On “the day called Christmas Day,” he noted that a few newcomers to the community asked to be excused from work, and he tolerantly said that “he would spare them until they were better informed.” But he then discovered that they were determined to celebrate “at play, openly,” as they traditionally had in England. He took away their implements of sport and sent them indoors.ⁱ

As New England became an increasingly diverse and complex society in the early 19th century, many traditional attitudes and practices began to lose their hold. Along with many other things, traditional beliefs about Christmas began to change. In the cities and among the highly prosperous, they altered relatively quickly. But in the countryside - whose social life and material culture Old Sturbridge Village represents - habits embedded in rural tradition and religious conviction changed much more slowly. The story is complex, because it involves distinctions of religious traditions, theology, and social class, as well as the classic divide between city and country.

Christmas attitudes and practices changed in the early 19th century as the contours of New England life were being transformed by increasing religious diversity, the continuing erosion and transformation of Calvinism, and advancing urbanization. For some New Englanders - a relative handful - Christmas observance was an integral part of their own religious traditions. For others, the acceptance of Christmas became a sign of emancipation from New England's Puritan past. For the substantial majority, Christmas remained alien to their traditions, an exotic and forbidden holiday.

To understand the way in which this story works out, we need to begin early in the 17th century. The reason for Bradford's opposition to Christmas was not mean-spiritedness but profound religious conviction. The English Puritans, like other Reformed or Calvinist Protestants, wanted to create forms of worship and church organization that were based only on the Holy Scriptures. The saints' days and feasts of the Church of England, of which there were literally over a hundred, were essentially the traditional ones of the Roman Catholic Church, adapted in each country to local custom; deep-rooted in the local traditions of the great majority of the English people, they had not been changed very much in the anglicization of the church begun by Henry VII and completed by Elizabeth. All such practices, they believed, were unscriptural, idolatrous, and distracting to the believer's concentration on the word of God.

The men and women who founded New England were determined to purify and simplify religious belief and practice. They wanted to “prune away” everything that was not directly commanded or described in the Bible. Thus the traditional Christian liturgy of the Mass and the sacraments, incense, candles, priestly vestments, statues of Jesus, Mary and the saints, religious images, stained glass windows, all had to go. So too did the ancient Christian calendar of Western Europe, with its saints' days and other “holy days,” except for the Sabbath. The birth of Christ is carefully described in the Gospel of Luke, but the date is never mentioned, nor do any of the New Testament writers discuss it as a day of celebration. That was enough for Puritans, Pilgrims, and other Reformed Protestants across Europe: the observance of Christmas on December 25 was pagan – the date of Saturnalia taken from the Roman calendar -- and should be ignored.

In England they had only limited success, because there were enormously powerful counterforces; even in the years of the Puritan Revolution and the Protectorate, when Puritans controlled the state, they were unable to extirpate the Church's traditional practice, and it returned in full flower after the Restoration.

In New England, where Puritans and Pilgrims came to create purified churches and communities, the situation was very different. The New Englanders who followed the Congregational way worshipped in unadorned meetinghouses, and sat through two hours-long Sabbath services of prayer, psalm singing and sermons unshaped by the Book of Common Prayer. The “plain style,” as it was called, extended to the calendar as well. As Reformed Christians, New England’s settlers did not observe Advent and Lent, keep any of the festivals of the saints or celebrate Easter and Christmas. Because Puritan magistrates and clergy remained firmly in control, the non-Puritan settlers who came from England were unable to transplant their observances into the New World.

Many things changed in New England over the 17th and 18th centuries, but the custom of Christmas nonobservance did not alter much. Over the generations, the descendants of the Puritan and Pilgrim settlers created a seasonal calendar for their agricultural communities that was strikingly austere compared to those of the traditional villages of Britain and most of Christian Europe. The weekly recurrence of the Sabbath was its principal pulsebeat, with one Sunday distinguished from the next by the reference of the prayer and sermon to current events, or the quarterly coming of Communion.

Thanksgiving was the great New England holiday, and Fast Day was its mirror image. In the 17th century days of thanksgiving or of fasting and humiliation had been proclaimed without necessary reference to the seasons, in order to recognize a great deliverance or a good harvest or to repent of the sinful behavior that had brought down an epidemic or a military defeat. As New England became a provincial agricultural society, its thanksgivings became annual celebrations of a bountiful harvest, proclaimed in late November or early December, and its days of humiliation were likewise routinized as yearly Fast Days, proclaimed in April. Thanksgiving was the “King and High priest of all Festivals,” as Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote, a combination of harvest festival, holy remembrance for the blessings of the year, and family ingathering. Other days of Yankee observance, which customarily interrupted work, were Election Day (the day on which the governor and assemblymen were elected, varying from one colony/state to another) Town Meeting Day - the day of the annual town meeting and election of town officers (in Massachusetts in March, but again varying from state to state), and Training Days - the twice or thrice-yearly occasions on which each town's militia band was required by law to assemble and engage in military drill. After the achievement of Independence the 4th of July was added to the calendar of communities across the United States, rapidly becoming a day of parades and oratory. By 1800 this spare calendar was as traditional to rural New England as was the complex web of saint's days, Michaelmas and Candlemas to the English countryside.

To the men and women who had grown up in this traditional New England world, Christmas was alien. The New Englanders who lived within this tradition were an overwhelming majority of the region's population in 1790. By 1840 there had been significant changes in urban life, but those who lived within the bounds of the Puritan heritage were still a substantial majority in New England as a whole in 1840, and a much larger proportion of people in village and countryside. They continued their traditional disregard of Christmas.ⁱⁱ

The diaries, letters, reminiscences and account books rural New Englanders testify that December 25th was simply another day of work - unless, of course, it fell on the Sabbath. The cellar of his family's house in Stonington, Connecticut, recalled Samuel Goodrich, “was dug in a single day, and that day was Christmas.” Many Yankee farmers spent the day butchering: “Helped Major Pickering kill a cow,” recorded Ephraim Coleman of Newington, New Hampshire in 1835, “he helped me kill a hog.” Stores, shops, offices, and taverns remained open, housewives followed their customary routines, and children went to school. The great majority of rural diarists took no special note of the 25th at all. ⁱⁱⁱ

Mary White of West Boylston, Massachusetts recorded the events of the years from 1835 to 1851 in the three volumes of her voluminous diary. She lavished weeks of time and energy on Thanksgiving every year but clearly never regarded December 25^th as anything but an ordinary day. Over the course of 16 “Christmases” - a word she never used - she noted her own activities: going to the store to “purchase a few articles,” having her son measured for a new coat, attending temperance lectures, putting up citrus and quince preserves, making and receiving visits. Her children still living at home attended “writing school” and “singing school” on the 25th, and one of them spent the day in 1846 calling “on some neighbors to sign a petition for peace” in opposition to the Mexican War. Hired men on the White farm spent the 25th taking grain to be ground at the grist mill, while neighbors arrived at her house to pick up boxes of butter to take to Worcester or to trade for lumber to repair a sled. Three of those December 25ths were Sabbath days; for each, she noted the scripture passage on which West Boylston's minister based his sermon. None of the texts referred to the birth of Jesus.^iv

Christmas first gained a foothold in New England through the Puritans' old nemesis, the Church of England. In the early 18th century the Anglican church, with the heavy support of the British government, had gained a bare foothold in the region. British royal officials and their families, connections and allies were the primary congregations. Later in the century a couple of young Congregational ministers who were tutors at Yale rejected their ancestral faith, went to England to be properly ordained by a bishop, and returned to establish Anglican parishes in Connecticut. By the early 19th century there was a still small but significant Episcopalian minority - the church in America had been renamed and reorganized after the American Revolution - in New England. Some lived in the region's largest cities and a few smaller seaports Boston, Portsmouth, Providence, Salem, Marblehead - and others were scattered around Connecticut. By 1830 there were a few dozen churches and a few thousand Episcopalians.^v

Like Anglicans on the other side of the Atlantic, New England Episcopalians maintained the old, “unreformed” religious calendar. Proudly conscious of their difference from their Congregationalist and Baptist neighbors, they “kept Christmas,” and Easter Advent and Lent.  Episcopalians attended Christmas services held according to the Book of Common Prayer, decorated their churches for the season with evergreen boughs, and observed the day with family dinner and sometimes the exchange of visits. in terms of feasts, New England Episcopalians had the best of both worlds -- the old way of Christmas, and the new, reformed festival of Thanksgiving, which they also celebrated.

By 1820, New England had a small minority of Roman Catholics, virtually all of them immigrant Irish. In subsequent decades, of course, their numbers grew significantly. New England Catholics celebrated Christmas according to the Latin Tridentine rite of the Church whenever they could attend. After the Diocese of Boston was established in 1783 masses were regularly said there, and curious Protestants often attended the elaborate Christmas liturgy. In most other places before 1840, with small and scattered populations served by travelling priests, Christmas masses were few and far between. By the mid 1840s, with an ever more massive Irish influx, Catholic services could be observed in many New England cities. Although Mary White did not recognize the date as Christmas, she did note that her daughter Caroline went to the city of Worcester on December 25^th ,1849, “to see the Roman Catholic Church and saw some of their religious exercises performed.”^vi

By 1840, keeping Christmas had also been adopted by a number of New Englanders who were neither Episcopalians or Roman Catholics. However, few of them lived in the countryside; most were well to do and sophisticated people who lived in the urban centers of power and cultural leadership. Their gradual drift toward Christmas observance began early in the nineteenth century. In 1817, the great merchants of Boston, the exporters, importers and wholesalers whose leaders were among the wealthiest and most influential men in the city, began to shut down their operations on Christmas day. To men and women from the more traditional and orthodox countryside, this was surprising and distasteful, as William Cobb, a storekeeper from rural Warwick, Massachusetts who had expected to finish up his business and head for home on December 25, noted in his diary.^vii A few years earlier, several Boston Congregational churches had started to hold Christmas services and decorate their interiors with evergreen boughs. In Hartford, the first non-Episcopal Christmas service took place in 1823 with a sermon in the Congregational Brick Meetinghouse, the place of worship of most of the city's prominent families. The Connecticut Courant, the newspaper that served as the voice of Connecticut's elite, urged that business be suspended during the day.^viii

Almost all of the Congregational churches adopting Christmas services were Unitarian-leaning congregations, examples of a deepening rift in New England's dominant religious tradition. By 1830 Unitarians had emerged as essentially a separate denomination, sharing a common Puritan religious ancestry with the orthodox Congregationalists but espousing a liberal and rationalistic Christianity. Like Episcopalians, they were disproportionately urban, well educated and well off. Concentrated in eastern Massachusetts - in Boston and surrounding towns, along the Essex County shore and in other large cities, the Unitarian minority was far more favorably disposed to keeping Christmas in meeting and at home than the majority of Congregationalists, who were known as orthodox or Trinitarian.

In Worcester County, Massachusetts, for example, the great majority of people in the country towns were Orthodox Congregationalists and Baptists, with growing numbers of Methodists and Universalists. But in the county seat of Worcester itself, the most prosperous families were predominantly Unitarians; by the 1820s, the meetinghouse of Worcester's first parish was the scene for Christmas services, and Worcester's Unitarian lawyers and merchants were giving Christmas dinners for their family and friends. In this they differed greatly from country people in surrounding communities, like the Whites of West Boylston, for whom Christmas did not exist.^ix

Why were New England Unitarians adopting Episcopal customs of Christmas observance? Obviously it did not reflect a theological stance about the importance of Christ's nativity, since they considered Jesus a man, greatest of the prophets and teachers, and not the divine son of God. But there are both religious and social explanations. “Keeping Christmas” was a highly visible way for Unitarians to separate themselves from the Calvinism of their forebears and their contemporaries. It suggested a more broadly tolerant, less rigid approach to life as well as religion. As well, it was a reflection of an increasing interest in and imitation of things English. “Anglophilia” was a powerful force in cultivated New England circles.

Most urban Episcopal and Unitarian families in the early nineteenth century were those of well-to-do merchants and professionals; they were the first people in New England to adopt the increasingly elaborate Christmas customs emerging elsewhere in the 19th-century Anglo-American world, in genteel English society and in New York City; elaborate holiday festivities, the giving of gifts and eventually the Christmas tree. These trends toward more elaborate family observance were just beginning to develop in the cities in the 1830s.

There were even a few well-to-do city households in which the Saint Nicholas story, Christmas presents and home decorations were familiar activities. In 1834 Rose Terry of Hartford, a precocious seven-year-old, made a Christmas wreath, hung up her stocking on Christmas Eve, and found “a dollar bill, a quarter of a dollar, a book and a paper of raisins. I think Saint Nicholas was very generous.”^x  But Rose and her family, Episcopalians who may have had New York connections, were not typical of the families in the region as a whole, or even of those in comparatively sophisticated Hartford.

Country people remained aloof from virtually any kind of family observance. Mary White of Boylston, Massachusetts was vastly more representative of ordinary practice than Rose Terry. But New Englander knew more about Christmas than they had previously. By the 1830s most rural New Englanders, rather than merely suspecting that some vaguely heathenish practices went on in Episcopal churches, southern plantations, or the Dutch areas of New York, surely knew something about how Christmas was celebrated elsewhere. Christmas observance in neighboring New York, particularly New York City, which drew on both the English and the Dutch Christmas tradition, was sometimes the theme of newspaper articles or topical publications. In 1827 the editor of the New England Farmer, clearly thinking it would be of some general interest to its readers, reprinted an article on Christmas observances from the New York Statesman.^xi A Book of the Seasons, published in Boston in 1839 and clearly aimed at New England children, provided in its chapter on “Winter” an extensive description of Christmas celebrations in New York City. Casting its description in the form of a letter home from a young New England girl visiting Manhattan, the book suggests strongly that the customs described would still be considered exotic by Yankee readers.^xii But it also portrays them in a very attractive – a Puritan might say seductive – light.

A powerful economic and cultural influence just to the south was pulling urban New Englanders into the orbit of Christmas. New York City had already pulled ahead of Philadelphia and Boston to become America's greatest metropolis of commerce, communications, style and fashion, and New York ways were seductive, even to straitlaced Yankees. During those years New Yorkers were inventing a recognizably modern American Christmas – they were putting English and Dutch traditions together to shape a holiday that involved gift-giving, religious observance, family gathering and feasting, the figure of St. Nicholas, and an increased focus on children – most of the elements of our modern Christmas. By the 1820s, there was a significant and expanidng element of commercialization as well -Christmas shopping! During the week before the holiday, fashionable stores in the city were illuminated and kept open through the evening. New York’s old-style Christmas observances had often been disorderly rather than worshipful – they had involved workers and apprentices carousng and demanding “tips” or “Christmas box” payments from their employers or customers. Elite New Yorkers reformed the holiday as a way of taking control, and in the process created the now familiar combination of Christianity, commerce, childhood and family. Prosperous city families in Boston, Hartford and Providence were influenced by this invented Christmas tradtion, a very non-Puritan mix of Dutch and English traditions.sentiments and consumption.

Families in the countryside held largely aloof from this, as we have seen. However, in terms of Christmas observance within the life of the churches, as distinguished from the life of the family, the 1820s and 1830s saw some changes in the cultural pattern of the countryside. Some rural denominations inched toward Christmas, other held fast. There is little evidence to connect rural New England Baptists with any form of Christmas observance; they were virtually as anti-liturgical as the early Puritans. New England Methodists, on the other hand, were not Calvinists, and had an early tradition of connection with the Church of England. A few of the small congregations of rural Methodist chapels - their numbers were relatively small in New England until the 1840s celebrated Christmas. However, this was far from universal. The New Hampshire farmer Ephraim Coleman was a Methodist; only once in his extensive diary did he refer to any sort of religious observances on December 25 -and that was an “evening lecture” which may well have been unrelated. On the other hand, Coleman appears to have been more aware of Christmas than the vast majority of New England farmer-diarists, noting it every year. ^xiii

Rural Unitarian churches followed those in the cities to hold Christmas services in their meetinghouses.^xiv15 Universalist churches were a significant minority in parts of Massachusetts, Vermont and Maine. They were “liberal” Christians who rejected Calvinism and affirmed the ultimate salvation of all humanity. Similar in belief to the Unitarians, they were more countrified and much less prosperous. But also like the Unitarians, they began to hold Christmas services - surely as expressions of their anti-Calvinism - in their meetinghouses relatively early in the 19th century. And Orthodox Congregational churches began slowly to yield some ground to Christmas. In the 1830s it became more common for Congregational ministers to choose a Scripture text and preach a sermon on Christ's birth on the Sabbath day nearest December 25. This was surely the practice of a minority of churches and ministers; there were many more churches, which followed the traditional path, like Mary White's in West Boylston. “Some of our churches are thrown open for appropriate exercises,” noted the Barre Gazette in 1839, “where but few however assemble…”^xv

It is important to be aware, however, that the Christmas Day exercises held in country meetinghouses were much plainer than Episcopal “illuminations,” not candle-lit services with bells and caroling; they were carried out in the reformed style of regular Sabbath worship, with scripture reading, hymns and anthems, and the preaching of a sermon.

Even in the gradual emergence of religious Christmas observance among rural Unitarians and Universalists we can see New England rural culture's deeply ingrained Puritanical reluctance to treat any day as sacred on its own account. This is dramatically evidenced in Ruth Henshaw Bascom's diary for 1829. Her husband Ezekiel, a Unitarian minister in the country town of Ashby, Massachusetts, had, like a number of other liberal ministers, recently introduced Christmas services to his congregation. But he began December 25, 1829 by presiding at a parishioner's funeral, held, as was the New England practice, at the deceased's house. He then led the mourners, with the hearse, in procession to the meetinghouse for “Christmas exercises. After the service the congregation proceeded to the graveyard for burial!^xvi

By the later 1840s Christmas observance had made great progress in New England's cities. Among well-to-do families, gift-giving, Christmas dinners and Christmas Day visiting were becoming widespread, although not universal, customs. In Windsor, Connecticut, a town very much in the cultural orbit of Hartford, the Rev. Thomas Robbins commented in 1846 that “much attention is paid to Christmas; presents are abundant.”^xvii 17 The editor of Lowell's New England Offering, writing about “The Holidays” in 1848, thought that Christmas in the 1840s had become “even with the descendants of the Puritans, a day of gifts and greetings ... It seems as though, without giving up their own 'peculiar institution' [Thanksgiving], the Yankees are desirous of incorporating in their calendar the merry days of the European world.”^xviii

This was of course, an exaggeration. Many urban New Englanders were recent arrivals from the countryside and held on to traditional ways. The most staunchly orthodox and evangelical families and churches in urban areas continued to reject Christmas – as, for example, did the members of Lyman Beecher's congregation at Boston's Park Street Church, where he was called to fight against Unitarianism.

In the countryside traditional ways persisted far longer, and the widespread adoption of Christmas observance did not come for decades. Writing in 1839, the editor of the Barre Gazette noted that there had been little change:

We hear no greeting of ‘Merry Christmas,’ we see no unfolding of the heart and hand to the influences that should hang around the occasion; it is a day of three hundred, when men eat, drink, work and lay down, thankful and unthankful, as may be the ordinary tenor of their minds.^xix

Rural diaries from the 1840's and 50's more often mention Christmas than earlier ones, but they still indicate that work went on as usual; however, Christmas services became more common in country churches -except Baptist ones - but were still far from universal. Eight years after the editor of the Barre Gazette had lamented that Christmas was largely ignore, things had begun to change in that country town. By the late 1840s, Barre, Massachusetts was holding a “united” Christmas Eve service in the Unitarian meetinghouse, which was decorated with “boughs of evergreen and festoons, devices and mottos,” and “brilliantly lighted from the ground to the summit of the tower.” In 1847, the ladies of the Universalist church in Barre held a “Christmas party” and dance at the Town Hall the night before. ^xx Barre was a likely country town to ‘pioneer” in the celebration of Christmas, since its religious makeup, with both Universalist and Unitarian churches, was not entirely typical of the countryside. At about the same time, a Barre merchant had begun to advertise the availability of both Christmas and New Year's gifts in December.

Theodore Parker's fictionalized description of the introduction of Christmas observance to the town of “Soitgoes, Worcester County, Massachusetts” in 1855 provides another look at the Unitarian and Universalist campaign for Christmas in the countryside in the decades before the Civil War. In “Soitgoes,” the Kindlys, a well-to-do family with Boston connections, celebrate Christmas with a large dinner and family visiting. For many, although not all, of their fellow townspeople the idea of Christmas observance is still a “queer” one, and they “wondered what our pious fathers would think of keeping Christmas in New England.” When the Kindlys seek to introduce a Christmas party for the town's children, with presents, it is clearly unprecedented, novel and exotic by the community's standards.^xxi We have not yet seen mention of Christmas gift exchange in rural diaries and reminiscences for the 1840s and 50s, although the Barre newspaper references suggest that there was some gift-giving going on.

There is little evidence to suggest that non-Episcopalian rural families had Christmas dinners, decorated their houses for Christmas or exchanged presents in the years before 1860. In the 1840's and 50's it is probable that more and more city children had visits from St. Nicholas or Santa Claus like Rose Terry's early and unusual one, although it would be quite difficult to trace Santa's progress in detail. One case in point is Leaves for a Christmas Bough, a book of typically moralistic children’s stories, that was published in Boston in 1849. It contained both a frontispiece showing children finding their presents under a Christmas tree and an opening chapter entitled “A Letter from Santa Claus.” For the vast majority of country children, it seems safe to assume that Santa remained only hearsay. The first faint sign of his presence is an interesting but enigmatic statement in the diary of a young Methodist farmer in Claremont, New Hampshire that “Old Santy Claus was around last night” on December 25, 1852. But no other rural sources from the 1840's and 50s have been found which mention Christmas presents or “the jolly old elf.”^xxii

But between 1820 and 1850 another cultural pattern was developing, one which superimposed gift exchange, visiting, and even an occasional dance on the traditional usage of New Year's Day as a time for settling accounts and examining consciences. For some New Englanders of orthodox background uneasy about breaking with the traditions of their ancestors, but wanting to engage in genteel holiday celebration, New Year's Day may well have taken the place of Christmas festivities. For them - many of them surely center village dwellers -New Year's visiting and gift exchange may have been a decades-long bridge between the old ways and the acceptance of Christmas. ^xxiii

Before 1830 Christmas trees in America could be found almost exclusively in the settlements of the Pennsylvania Germans; they had been traditional in the fatherland. A John Lewis Krimmel sketch ca. 1817, apparently of a Pennsylvania “Deitsch” household gathered around a small tabletop tree, is one of the earliest American representations. However, decorated trees were obviously not terribly common even in Pennsylvania homes; as late as 1840, when a storekeeper in York, Pennsylvania put up a Christmas tree at his residence, it was considered such a curiosity that he put it on exhibition and charged the townspeople to see it!^xxiv

The tree arrived in New England in the early 1830s. Harriet Martineau, the English traveller, noted in 1835 that she had helped to decorate a “German Christmas tree” at the Cambridge home of Carl Follen, a recently arrived German scholar who was a teacher of languages at Harvard. Unaware of Pennsylvania German customs, she though that she had been present at the Christmas tree's introduction into “the new country.”^xxv

However, there is no evidence that the tree Martineau saw in Cambridge was widely imitated elsewhere in New England over the next decade. By 1849, there was a Christmas tree shown in a New England publication, Leaves for a Christmas Bough, but that image was not a freshly drawn New England scene but a copy of Krimmel’s by then 30-year-old engraving.^xxvi By that time it is possible that a number of urban New England families were beginning to adopt the practice. In the decade just before the Civil War, the Christmas tree was winning acceptance in upper and middle class homes in America; this was almost certainly due to its prominence in the family Christmas celebrations of those British royal style-setters, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Albert had brought the custom from Saxe-Coburg in his native Germany.

Theodore Parker’s fictional “Kindlys,” a city family, have adopted the Christmas tree as part of their family celebration by 1855, but to their new rural neighbors in “Soitgoes” it is a cataclysmic, “Popish” innovation. Parker clearly implies that the country people of Worcester County have never seen one before.”^xxvii It seems reasonable to assume that the Christmas tree took until the 1870s to gain much of a foothold in the countryside.

In New England, Christmas observance was linked to affluence, urban residence, and a religious identification that repudiated New England orthodoxy. Long practiced by Episcopalians, it made the greatest early nineteenth century headway among Unitarians and Universalists, and those urban Congregationalists who leaned in an anti-orthodox direction. Some acknowledgement and observation of Christmas could be found wherever these religious liberals were numerous.

In the countryside before 1840, the recognition and observance of Christmas would have been rare in most places. It was here that the “reformed” seasonal calendar of the Puritans remained in force the longest. But commitment to the old austerity continued to wane. After 1840 Christmas infiltrated the rural world; meetinghouses began to be decorated, sermons began to be preached on Christmas themes, newspapers and children’s books began to reflect an everyday assumption that Christmas was part of the calendar. Complete rejection became an attitude harder and harder to sustain, although the Baptists held out for decades longer than the Orthodox Congregationalists. By the 1860s, Mary White’s children were celebrating Christmas. Her grandchildren and their descendants would assume that it was an old tradition.